'Ne travaillez jamais". That was the graffiti scrawled on a Paris wall in 1953. This fine piece of anti-work propaganda was the work of the Situationist International, a group of hard-drinking French intellectuals who attacked consumer capitalism, the jobs system and the leisure industry.

It was this sort of anger which led to the Paris riots of 1968, a revolt against boredom, work, suffering, loneliness and humiliation. The next really significant outcry was a few years later, in the great literary, artistic and political movement called punk. The Sex Pistols and the Clash took up situationist themes: "I don't want a holiday in the sun" sang Johnny Rotten. "We don't work, I just feed, that's all I need." And Joe Strummer shouted defiantly: "I won't open a letter bomb for you," and "London's burning with boredom now."

The Buzzcocks and Iggy Pop both sang about boredom, too.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse. The 60s and the 70s now look to us like a veritable paradise of dossy jobs and everyday freedoms. Unions were strong and therefore wages were often high and conditions often good. You could smoke wherever you wanted and kids played on the streets. There were no CCTV cameras and there was a nice relic of dandyism in men's clothing.

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: "What do you do?" is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality.

"What have you been thinking about?" - that is what we should ask. And if asked: "What do you do?" simply reply: "I'm a neo-situationist currently engaged in a total overhaul of the oppressive wages system."

Someone has to, before we all die of boredom.

· Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler and author of How To Be Idle (Penguin, £7.99). To order a copy with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 8360875